Category: Activists & Organizations

Joe Arpaio, sheriff of
Maricopa County, Arizona, on
September 18 received United Animal
Nations’ Animals’ Choice Award for
forming a Pet Posse to investigate and
ensure prosecution of animal abuse
cases, and for converting an obsolete
jail into a shelter for abused animals,
staffed by female inmate volunteers.
The Alternatives Research
& Development Foundation, a subsidiary
of the American Anti-Vivisection
Society, on October 1 presented its
$5,000 William A. Cave Award t o
MatTek Corporation president John
Sheasgreen for his success in marketing
to major corporations a line of project
safety tests which do not require animal
testing. Cave headed American AV
from 1978 until his death in 1990.

COLUMBUS, Ohio––An estimated
one million battery-caged laying hens died
slowly from thirst, exposure, and starvation
or were reportedly crushed by bulldozers on
October 2 and 3 after two weeks of suffering,
following a September 20 tornado which
destroyed the water-and-feed systems serving
twelve 85,000-hen barns at the Buckeye Egg
Farm complex in Croton, Ohio.
The Croton complex is the biggest
of four owned by Buckeye, the fourth largest
egg producer in the U.S., formerly known as
AgriGeneral LP.
Ohio Department of Agriculture
spokesperson Mark Anthony told Mike
Lafferty of the Columbus Dispatch o n
September 21 that the trapped hens would
have to be killed and buried, burned, or rendered
as promptly as possible.
“And the process has to be done
humanely, too,” Anthony insisted. “These
chickens are not going to die of thirst.”

Humane Society of the U.S. president
emeritus John A. Hoyt was a Baptist
minister who became a Presbyterian minister,
took over HSUS in 1970, and took home
more money in each of the next 25 years than
the total budgets of most humane societies
that actually save animals.
Hoyt in 1975 hired Methodist minister
Paul G. Irwin as his sidekick.

LIMA––One of the first public
animal rights demonstrations in Peru featured
an estimated 200 people marching
with dogs on leashes through the affluent
Lima suburb of Miraflores on July 21 to
protest the shooting of a 10-month-old
Staffordshire terrier named Venancio.
Venancio, the pet of march organizer
Hector Rospigliosi, on the evening
of July 1 reportedly rushed up to an 11-
year-old boy who was playing with a ball
in a public park. Barking loudly,
Venancio scared the boy, who according
to his father was bitten on the hand while
trying to keep possession of the ball. The
boy fled to his grandfather. The grandfather
fetched a handgun from his car.
Rospigliosi immediately leashed
Venancio, he told Associated Press correspondent
Rick Vecchio, and walked away,
calling the police as he did so on a cellular
telephone. The grandfather meanwhile
called the boy’s father on a cellular telephone
of his own. The father raced to the
scene, allegedly stopped Rospigliosi at
gunpoint, and shot Venancio just before
the police arrived.

TUCSON––Nearly 650 animal
defenders and thousands of gun nuts converged
on September 17 at the Tucson
Convention Center. The last day of the 6th
annual No-Kill Conference had been booked,
unknown to conference organizer Lynda Foro
of Doing Things For Animals, just a glass
wall away from the first day of a weekend gun
show and rallying event for supporters of
Arizona ballot Proposition 102.
Backed by the Tucson-based Safari
Club International and the National Rifle
Association, Proposition 102 would require
that future state initiatives regarding wildlife
management must get a two-thirds majority.
As the crowds gathered, SHARK
founder Hindi and ANIMAL PEOPLE editor
Merritt Clifton strode through the lines awaiting
admission to the gun show to the NRA
membership recruiting table and delivered to
the man who seemed to be in charge a written
challenge to debate at one hour past high noon.

MULTAN, Pakistan– – International human rights monitors consider Pakistan one of the hardest of all places to advocate for women and minorities. Animals scarcely rate public notice.

Among the major international animal protection organizations, only the British-based Brooke Hospital for Animals and World Wildlife Fund maintain a presence in Pakistan––and the four Brooke clinics deal almost exclusively with equines, while the prohunting WWF confines its concerns to wildlife.

The World Society for Animal Protection campaigns on behalf of dancing bears in Pakistan, but faxes press releases to Islamabad media from London.

Maddie’s Fund on September 21
awarded a start-up grant of $61,000 to the
Lodi Pet Saving Connection, a coalition
formed to achieve no-kill animal control in
Lodi, California, by the end of 2005. The nokill
rescue group Animal Friends Connection
heads the project, which also includes L o d i
Animal Services, all eight Lodi veterinary
hospitals, and four veterinary clinics in the surrounding
area. If the coalition meets each of
the neutering and adoption goals set by agreement
with Maddie’s, it will get $500,000 over
the next five years, during which it must cut
the number of dogs and cats killed in community
shelters by about 1,500.

“For the first time, in a country
where human rights are routinely violated,
someone has been convicted of cruelty to
an animal,” London Observer Service correspondent
Martin Dayani recently reported
from Bogota, Colombia. District Judge
Elsa Lucia Romero, of Suba, a northern
Bogota suburb, jailed two men for three
months and fined them each the value of 35
grams of gold for allegedly setting a street
dog named L u c a s on fire with a blowtorch
and then leaving him to suffer for 24 hours
with the burns that eventually killed him.
“Legally this was a watershed,” Romero told
Dayani. “What was important in this case
was that people had reported the incident. I
considered that the death of the dog caused
upset among the local residents,” who
demanded justice even though the 10-year-old
Colombian cruelty law was so obscure that
Romero had difficulty finding a copy of it.
Continued Romero, “This case appears to
have given publicity to the wide-scale abuse
of animals in our society, which is important,
as ignorance surrounding the legal rights of
animals encourages impunity.” Added animal
advocate Emiliano Castro, “Colombians will
never achieve a peaceful society based on
human dignity and respect for one another if
we can’t first learn to respect the rights of our
brothers in the animal kingdom.”

VANCOUVER, B.C.– – The
Royal Canadian Mounted Police on
September 25 withdrew charges that frequent
Animal Liberation Front spokesperson
David Barbarash, 36, and his
longtime associate Darren Todd
Thurston, 30, sent more than 20 razor
blade-rigged letters to hunters, furriers,
and a newspaper columnist.
R C M P spokespersons told
media that they remain confident that
Barbarash and Thurston were rightly
accused, but felt an order from British
Columbia Supreme Court Justice
Kenneth Lysyk to fully disclose the evidence
against them would jeopardize
confidential sources and agreements
with other law enforcement agencies to
protect the other agencies’ sources.

SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION

This site is currently under construction. We apologize for any temporary inconvenience.
Please e-mail info@animalpeopleforum.org with questions or concerns, or to request any articles or issues not yet available online.